Plus ça change, plus la même chose. I’m re-visiting two pieces which date back to my freshman and sophomore years at the Peabody Conservatory, no less. That was in 1972-73, but who’s counting? (I am. As of this September, when the Conservatory opens its 2006-2007 school year in its new digs on Oak Street, it will have been 35 years since my oh-so-nervous first week at Peabody.)
Well. As a result of recording the complete Haydn piano sonatas (in the order they appear in the Henle edition), it is now time to prepare and record Hoboken XVI:2, in B-flat Major. This sonata was given to me at my very first piano lesson with Elizabeth Katzenellenbogen, my first teacher at Peabody. I remember vividly that I brought her the Tchaikovsky B-flat Concerto, first movement, for my first lesson. Mrs. K never heard it, but proceeded to assign me the Bach C-minor Invention and this Haydn sonata. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been assigned to her studio because I was considered a near-basket case, admissable but in dire need of a major overhaul. Mrs. K was the “mechanic” teacher on the piano faculty, the one who got the damaged goods for repair. My teenage years had been very tough and my musical growth had been stunted. If anything, I had regressed. Looking back, I’m rather astonished that I was admitted to any decent conservatory.
Mrs. K was not one for psychological sugar-coating. We were going back to Step One of piano playing, and there would be no detours along the way to stroke my adolescent ego. I walked out of that lesson closer to tears than I had been all during the first week at Peabody — and I had been on the verge of a major bawling session from the day I arrived. The entire experience was so intimidating that I couldn’t yet see that I was, for the first time in my life, in a place where I actually belonged.
So today I hauled out my old Christa Landon edition of the Haydn sonatas and looked through some of Mrs. K’s markings from our first few lessons. Obviously I needed a firm hand, and also required having the oh-so obvious pointed out. Furthermore (here I’m reading her markings with the practiced eye of almost three decades of Conservatory-level teaching) I detect a perfunctory tone in her written remarks. This was our test drive, and she wasn’t about to waste much energy on her new little hayseed. Perhaps she was thinking: “oh, why oh why do they always send me these types? Can’t I get one of the real top talents, just once???”
So I learned the B-flat Haydn sonata, and then several more, and more Bach inventions, and didn’t seem to be getting much of anywhere. Mrs. K was growing very weary of me, I know. Actually I was making quite a lot of progress except that it just wasn’t showing, like a tunnel-digging operation that seems endless until suddenly WHAP you break through. There had been quite a few revelations during my fall semester; among the most important was my discovery of Mozart. (The operas were like a bomb going off for me. All I had known were a few of the piano sonatas, and I thought they were hopelessly boring.) I had a very good natural ear, which was responding in leaps and bounds to training. Theory, on the other hand, was not coming along well.
But I soldiered on. (Mrs K told me later that she wasn’t sure I’d be back in January for the spring semester.) I’m not altogether sure what the convergence was, but I clicked almost overnight and during that spring semester brought her a Bach Sinfonia in D Minor that utterly blew her socks off. All of a sudden I actually started listening to my playing; before that point I had played almost entirely physically and hormonally. It’s as though the connection had been made: oh….it’s all about the brain and the ear, and not the hands. I somehow latched on that the (extremely vivid) musical world in my mind was safe to express to the outside world. I still don’t quite understand what happened; but I will never forget the first experience of actually listening, playing, and imagining — sitting in a practice room one night and playing the first four measures of that sinfonia over and over, endlessly, always fascinated in what I was hearing: experimenting, listening, imagining, discovering, growing.
So that led to my sudden, dramatic change in status — from Mr. Basket Case I very quickly turned into Mrs. K’s star pupil. At the same time I started growing a lot in my other classes, as well. (Theory still had a ways to go, though.)
As can happen, my little awakening also left me with the sudden realization that I was at the end of the line with Mrs K. So I played for Konrad Wolff (one of the ‘big’ teachers at Peabody in those days) and he accepted me for the next year, with Mrs. K’s approval and very sweet blessing.
It was with Dr. Wolff that I started studying the Schubert B-flat Posthumous sonata, D. 960, a work that had been my greatest refuge and consolation for the last few years of high school, when my predominant mindstates were anxiety and/or protective introversion. The Schubert B-flat was my next big breakthrough piece; I think I achieved my first distinct coming-of-age as a pianist with that work; oh, I was still very much a student pianist, but after the six months or so spent delving into my own mind and heart with that work, I was definitely professionally-bound. It was a good work for me; I played it on my first public recital at Peabody, which brought me a surprising amount of attention.
Not too long after that I left Peabody (the details are long and boring) and entered the SF Conservatory — where I have remained — in 1974.
Somewhere along the way during the next decade I headed into hot-virtuoso mode, playing a lot of hardcore stuff like the Godowsky-Chopin transcriptions, Rachmaninoff etudes, and big contemporary pieces. It was a mistake; I’m really not a hotshot type pianist emotionally. That disconnect was one of the elements leading to my almost complete burnout as a pianist at around age 40, when I ended my performing and piano-teaching life. Over the last several years I’ve started performing again, this time around picking up the thread that I abandoned so many years ago — i.e., honoring my true nature as a pianist much more at home with Bach, Haydn, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Debussy — and not the big hotshit playing the Charles Ives sonatas. Important lesson: just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.
So I retrace the circle: I’m playing the Schubert B-flat Posthumous again, after not having played it for 32 years. A dearly-loved friend from my adolescence, and earliest tentative adulthood. Of course a lot has changed. There is, however, one constant: I still feel thoroughly inadequate about ever realizing even a fraction of the work’s ultimate beauty. As long as that remains the case, I know I’ll be alright.